The proposed research centers on two critical aspects of speech perception in normal subjects. The first is an investigation of the role of syntactic structure and prosodic features in perceptual segmentation of heard speech on the sentence and clausal level. Studies of segmentation strategies for normal and time-compressed speech will be used to shed light on segmentation as a means of reducing perceptual and memory processing demands in ongoing speech perception. The second aspect of this research concentrates on an investigation of the theoretical construct of a limited capacity central processor as it applies to the perception of speech under high load and overload conditions in the presence of subsidiary activities. The results of these studies may have potential applicability to methods of study and assessment of cases of debilitated function in language processing and processing capacity in neurological patients and others with perceptual and/or communicative disorders.